Spring in the North

Retired snowboarder x train attendant

Three years ago, Jian Yang won a gold medal in the snowboard halfpipe at the X Games in Aspen, USA. That competition was both the peak and the end of his professional career.

At the hospital, his coach Tan Nan, who had planned to use the gold medal to confess his feelings, came to visit him with his wife, rubbing salt into the wound of their four-year-long ambiguous relationship.

Three years later, Jian Yang set off alone for the snow season in Altay, carrying his snowboard.

Aboard Train Y566, he asked the attendant, who looked a little tired, if they could find somewhere to put his snowboard. The moment the attendant walked over, Jian Yang caught sight of the golden name badge and the face hidden beneath the wide brim of his hat.

A day later, near the bottom of the advanced Silver Run, just before sunset, he saw someone in a dark blue snowsuit suddenly take off their goggles and fall backward into the knee-deep powder.

As if possessed, he called out, “Shang Shixu!”

For seven years, Shang Shixu had been trapped in a blizzard in Altay. Apart from work, he was world-weary and pessimistic, searching for a way out in the vast white wilderness in a nearly self-torturing, suicidal manner, until someone sent snow flying into the air, stopped in front of him, and reached out without hesitation...

Mutual salvation

(A product of a writing frenzy. Don’t take the professional details too seriously. If you do, all I can do is go get a ski instructor’s license, sob.)

Theme: You have to keep looking forward, right~